Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Bold Plan For The Future Of Facebook

Facebook is firing on all cylinders. Now Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the decade
ahead, from AI to VR to drones.

By Harry McCracken

Fast Company | November 16, 2015 | 6:00 AM

"Mark is fixing stuff."

Im killing time in the Frank Gehrydesigned Building 20, whose signature feature is
its soaring 434,000 square feet of open space, the latest addition to Facebooks
campus in Menlo Park, California. A PR handler is explaining why CEO Mark
Zuckerberg is running slightly behind schedule for our chat. I express surprise. Mark
still fixes stuff?

"To say hes actively involved," she confides, "is an understatement. He notices
things that are broken before anybody."

As recently as 2012, the year Zuckerberg set a personal goal to code every day,
that might have meant he had detected something glitchy on Facebooks site and
was reprogramming it himself. When he emerges a few minutes later, unspecified
stuff presumably fixed, we sit down on adjacent couches in a fishbowl conference
room near his desk in Building 20, and Zuckerberg makes it clear that those days
are gone. "If were trying to build a world-class News Feed, and a world-class
messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system,
and invent virtual reality, and build drones, I cant write every line of code," he tells
me. "I cant write any lines of code."

The Facebook of todayand tomorrowis far more expansive than it was just a few
years ago. Its easy to forget that when the company filed to go public on February
1, 2012, it was just a single website and an app that the experts werent sure could
ever be profitable. Now, "a billion and a half people use the main, core Facebook
service, and thats growing. But 900 million people use WhatsApp, and thats an
important part of the whole ecosystem now," Zuckerberg says. "Four hundred
million people use Instagram, 700 million people use Messenger, and 700 million
people use Groups. Increasingly, were just going to go more and more in this
direction."

To further grow these services and any others that Facebook develops or acquires,
Zuckerberg is betting his companys future on three major technology initiatives.
One is developing advanced artificial intelligence that can help Facebook
understand what matters to users. The second is virtual reality, in the form of
Oculus VR, the groundbreaking company that Facebook acquired in March 2014 for
$2 billion, which Zuckerberg believes will be the next major technology we use to
interact with each other. And the third is bringing the Internet, including Facebook,
of course, to the 4 billionplus humans who arent yet connected, even if it requires
flying a drone over a village and beaming data down via laser. Given the robust
health of Facebooks business, Zuckerberg is comfortable lavishing attention and
resources on these visions. Facebook gave Fast Company wide-ranging access to
Zuckerberg, his senior leadership team, and others to delve into the companys
audacious plans to shape the next decade.

Click to expand

In the tech industry, theres nothing weird about setting goals so lofty that they
sound unachievable. Google CEO Larry Page, for instance, is so invested in the

virtue of gambling on disparate, wildly ambitious projectsfrom self-driving cars to

smart contact lensesthat he restructured his company around the concept in
August, making Googles core businesses a division of a new idea factory called
Alphabet. Zuckerberg, by contrast, isnt interested in doing everythingjust the
things he views as deeply related to his companys central vision, and crucial to it.
"There are different ways to do innovation," he says, drawing a stark contrast
without ever mentioning Page, Google, or Alphabet. "You can plant a lot of seeds,
not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this
really isnt how weve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces
we need and go deep on them, and be committed to them." Facebooks mission is
"to give everyone in the world the power to share and make the world more open
and connected," as Zuckerberg says, explaining that he is now spending a third of
his time overseeing these future initiatives. "These things cant fail. We need to get
them to work in order to achieve the mission."

When Facebook was morphing from Ivy League college project to Silicon Valley
startup, Zuckerberg had not only "never run a companyhed never been in a
company," marvels Marc Andreessen, the browser pioneer, venture capitalist,
Facebook board member, and longtime Zuckerberg confidant. "Hes learned
everything he knows about business in the last 10 years. And now hes one of the
best CEOs in the world."

Whether because Zuckerberg, 31, started so young, or because he retains his

youthful demeanor and gray-T-shirt work uniform, he has been underestimated for
almost as long as his company has existed. Facebook wouldnt work outside
Harvard. It wouldnt work outside elite colleges. It wouldnt work among the general
populace. It couldnt topple MySpace. It couldnt make enough money to justify its
valuation. It couldnt hold on to teenagers once their parents signed up. It wouldnt
matter as much on smartphones as it had on PCs. It couldnt make enough money
on mobile to satisfy Wall Street.

Zuckerberg and his team have overcome every doubt. Nine out of ten of the 1.55
billion people a month who use Facebook access it on a mobile device at least part
of the time, and more than three-quarters of its $4.3 billion in advertising revenue in
the third quarter of 2015 came from mobile users. The company runs four of the six
largest social platforms in the world (all but Googles YouTube and Tencents
WeChat) and is wildly profitable. Three years ago, when the company revealed that
1 billion people logged in to the service in one month, the news was astounding.
Last August, 1 billion people used Facebook on a single Monday, and it felt
inevitable.

When I ask people close to Zuckerberg how, exactly, he has pulled off these
achievements, I dont hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally
making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they
praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to
improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into
small, doable victories. "Most of our conversation was about long-term strategy, and
then wed backtrack from there to what we should do over the next month," says
Bret Taylor, who worked as Facebooks CTO from 2009 to 2012 and who was at the
company when it corrected course after a famously bumpy first attempt at putting
the service on smartphones. "Its one of the main reasons why Facebook is where it
is today."

Zuckerberg "is a total inspiration in how much he cares about his work and in how
hard he works," says Chris Cox, who dropped out of a Stanford graduate program in
2005 to join the company as a software engineer and is now chief product officer
and is so integral to its culture that he still speaks with every new employee as part
of his or her orientation. "For all of us who work with him, its like, Man, he is so
good at improving."

Sue Desmond-Hellmann is a Facebook board member and CEO of the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, which puts her in close proximity to two prodigies who quit
Harvard to seek fortunes out west. Both Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, she says, "have
this sense of relentlessness. Why cant that happen? Why cant we accomplish
this? It can be fun to be around that. It can also be like, Oh. My. God."

When I meet with COO Sheryl Sandberg, she shares a personal story of a family
gathering involving the making of smores. It captures several of Zuckerbergs
preternatural gifts. "Mark said, Im going to make a marshmallow," she tells me in
her conference room, which is adorned with a framed drawing of her as SpiderWoman. "I looked at my friend and said, Hes going to make the perfect
marshmallow. Because hes going to be the one out of all of us who is going to
have the patience. In order to make the right marshmallow, you cant do it right in
the fire, because then it gets burnt. You cant walk away. You actually have to sit
there for five to 10 minutes with the marshmallow above the flame, but not too
close, so that it gets completely heated but doesnt burn. And the only person whos
actually willing to do that is Mark. Because he is that focused and that determined.
Ive never met anyone with more perseverance than Mark Zuckerberg."

In hindsight, there were two particular moments that have put Facebook in the
enviable position of being able to pursue its most audacious dreams. The first was a
recruiting spree back in 20072008, when the company concluded that it needed
more players with serious Silicon Valley experience. A significant percentage of the
current leadership joined during this time, including Sandberg, who came from
Google to be the principal architect of the business. From Mozilla, the Firefox
browser purveyor, Zuckerberg hired Mike Schroepferknown universally as Schrep
who ultimately replaced Taylor as CTO.

"The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for
five, seven, 10 years? Its just awesome," says Zuckerberg. "I care about openness
and connectedness in a global sense. [Sandberg] has the emotional warmth and
ability to connect with people that allows us to live that mission inside the company.
Shes even better than people think she is." As for Schrep, "hes just extraordinary
at the patience and composure you need for managing long-term projects."

"One of our goals," Zuckerberg says, "is to get better than human level at all of
the primary senses."

Zuckerberg, unlike many of his rivals, has been able to keep his leadership team
stable. Their cohesiveness led to the second key moment: the Instagram acquisition
and its subsequent success.

When Facebook announced that it was buying the photo-sharing juggernaut in April
2012, less than six weeks before its IPO, a flurry of articles followed with titles such
as "Five Ways Facebook Will Ruin Instagram." Instead, the deal became a model for
how businesses in Facebooks portfolio get managed. Zuckerberg left cofounders
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in charge, encouraged them to preserve their own
culture, and gave them access to toolsfrom Facebooks recruiting team to its
spam-fighting technologiesthat helped them get where they were planning to go
anyway, only faster.

"Schrep and I work day-to-day, operationally, on how we build our team, where we
hire from, organizational stuff," says Systrom, Instagrams lanky, bearded CEO.
"Mark and I work most closely on product. And Sheryl and I work most closely on

advertising and strategic issues around policy. Imagine getting to have Mark, Sheryl,
and Schrep on your board. Many companies in the Valley would kill to have that.
And we get it by default, which is pretty sweet." Instagrams user base tripled in the
10 months after the acquisition announcement, to 100 million monthly users, then
doubled in the next 13 months. (It now boasts 400 million users.)

Naomi Gleit VP, product, social good: "We are taking a data-driven, product-driven
approach to doing good in the world. Youre interested in certain causes, and youre
also interested in the causes that your friends are interested in, so were trying to
take a social angle."

The lessons Facebook learned from the deal may have been as valuable as
Instagrams revenue potential. It began pursuing major acquisitions more
aggressivelyit acquired WhatsApp and Oculus in early 2014and then found itself
looking at its own services with fresh eyes. Zuckerberg hired PayPal president David
Marcus to run its chat product, Messenger, and decided to remove it from
Facebooks smartphone version, forcing users to download a stand-alone app. "We
were all incredibly uncomfortable with that," says a former Facebook employee who
was present when Zuckerberg explained his rationale. "But he had thought it
through carefully, the core use cases and the competitive situation." A little over a
year later, Messengers active user base more than tripled.

Splitting Messenger off from Facebook let Marcus begin to build his own business
model, one akin to Chinas messaging behemoth WeChat. Messenger has its own
app store, with partners such as ESPN offering animated GIFs, and a feature that
allows companies (including e-commerce retailers Everlane and Zulily) to conduct
customer servicefrom delivery tracking to returnswithin Messenger. "Were not
in a rush," says Marcus. "But over time, we can build a really good business out of
these interactions."

Three thousand miles away from Facebooks Menlo Park headquarters, in an office
building in New Yorks Noho neighborhood that was once a Wanamaker department
store, a researcher named Rob Fergus is showing me software designed to identify
objects in a video stream. Computers have long struggled to learn whats happening
in video, which contains so much more data than text or a still photo. He points a
webcam thats attached to a laptop running his program at a remote control. The
software, which is so computationally intensive that it causes the cooling fans inside

his laptop to kick in at a full, ear-piercing blast, thinks the remote is a turtle. He
focuses the camera on a computer mouse. Once again, it thinks its spotted a turtle.
Only occasionally does it correctly identify an item.

Fergus looks sheepish. But the point of the demonstration isnt to prove that
Facebook is ready to roll out this AI feature, just that theyre working on it.

If youve ever felt like your Facebook News Feed is filled with people you dont care
about sharing thoughts you didnt particularly want to hear, youll appreciate why
Facebook is pushing to further the art of artificial intelligence. In its current form,
the social network is still far better at collecting vast amounts of data than
understanding what that data means. Advanced AI could help emphasize the stuff
thats truly relevant to you, keeping you on the service longer and boosting your
attractiveness as a subject for targeted advertising. "Facebook is working to be at
the center of the world of AI because it will affect Instagram, WhatsApp, and
Messenger," says Systrom. "Its broadly applicable to all social products."

Facebook has dabbled in AI for years. In 2010, for example, it introduced facialrecognition technology to identify people in photos. In late 2013, though,
Zuckerberg came to believe that AIwhich he calls "one of the hardest engineering
challenges of our time"was central to the companys future and decided to
establish a lab devoted to it. He began courting Yann LeCun, a New York University
faculty member and world-class expert in deep learning, to run it. Unlike the
archetypal young turk Facebook employee, the 55-year-old, Paris-born LeCun is an
minence grise of his craft, with decades of experience studying machine vision,
pattern recognition, and other technologies with the potential to make the social
network smarter.

LeCun, however, was disinclined to leave academia or New York. When Zuckerberg
thinks Facebook needs something, though, he refuses to treat obstacles as
obstacles. He offered to let LeCun set up Facebook AI Researchs headquarters in
Manhattan and retain his professorship on the side. LeCun came aboard. Problem
solved.

Because Zuckerberg would not be able to interact with LeCun in person on a daily
basis, he had the AI researchers who did work at Facebooks main campus sit near
him so he could learn from them. "When we moved to the new building, we ended
up being separated from Zuck by about 10 yards," LeCun chuckles. "He said, No,
this is too far, move closer." And so they did. (This is a signature move that
Zuckerberg uses to absorb new material; when the team prepared Facebooks
Timeline feature in 2011, he placed key design talent near his desk, and he seated
Systrom near him after the Instagram acquisition.)

The mandate for the 50-person AI team is also vintage Zuckerberg: Aim ridiculously
high, and focus on where you want to go over the long term. "One of our goals for
the next five to 10 years," Zuckerberg tells me, "is to basically get better than
human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general
cognition. Taste and smell, were not that worried about," he deadpans. "For now."

In part, the AI effort is an attempt to prepare Facebook for an era in which devices
from wristwatches to cars will be connected, and the density of incoming
information which the service will have to deal with will grow exponentially. "There's
just going to be a lot more data generated about what's happening in the world, and
the conventional models and systems that we have today won't scale," says Jay
Parikh, the company's VP of engineering. "If there's 10x or 20x or 50x more things
happening around you in the world, then you're going to need these really, really
intelligent systems like what Yann and his team are building."

But Fergus and his fellow researchers have the freedom to start small rather than
think immediately of the massive data problems posed by services with several
hundred million users or more. Antoine Bordes, who relocated from a French
university to join the New York team (though theres now a Paris branch because the
city is also a hotbed of AI talent), is teaching a computer concepts such as "John is
in the playground" and "John picked up the football" in order to help it learn to
answer queries such as "Where is the football?" Everything draws on a vocabulary
of just 50 words, a purposefully dinky number chosen so that researchers can tell
exactly whats going on. "This is not big data," says Bordes, who is wearing a T-shirt
depicting a robot boxing a dinosaur. "This is supersmall data."

"I joke that the lab has paid for itself over the next five years with work theyve
already done," says Schroepfer.

LeCun has given Facebook a lab with a strong universitylike feel. Rather than having
to make sure their work lines up with Facebooks product plans, researchersmany
of them fellow academicscan pursue their passions while a separate group,
Applied Machine Learning, is
responsible for figuring out how to turn the labs breakthroughs into features. "The
senior research scientists, you dont tell them what to work on," LeCun says. "They
tell you whats interesting."

Technologies incubated by LeCun and his team are already popping up in Facebook
products such as Moments, a new app that scours your phones camera roll for
snapshots of friends, then lets you share those photos with those people. "Most
researchers do care about their stuff having practical relevance," says Fergus, who
is technically still on leave from NYU, where he worked alongside LeCun. "In
academia, a great outcome is you publish a paper that people seem to like at a
conference."

LeCuns work is directly affecting Facebooks bottom line, in the form of better
spam-prevention tools and software to verify that ads are up to company standards,
a task that was once a labor-intensive manual process. "I joke that the lab has paid
for itself over the next five years with work theyve already done," says Schroepfer.

Palmer Luckey and I are flapping our arms in adjoining isolation-booth-like rooms in
Oculuss quarters in Building 18 on Facebooks campus. In the virtual-reality world
were sharing, though, Luckey, the endearing 23-year-old wunderkind who founded
Oculus VR in his parents garage in 2011, has transmogrified himself into a
hovering, cartoony head and hands, and were playing antigravity Ping-Pong. Next,
we set off fireworks together and he shoots me with a zap gun, which instantly
shrinks me to the size of a gnat as he towers above me.

A few days later, when I meet with Zuckerberg for our first conversation, hes eager
to talk about Oculus Ping-Pong even before I begin asking him questions. As he
delineates the pleasures that user-adjustable physics bring to table tennis, his
expression takes on some of the same goofy glee Id experienced. (Zuckerberg, a
gamer himself, is a devotee of Civilization, a venerable game series that Oculus
CEO Brendan Iribe worked on in a previous life. The goal of the original 1991 version

of Civ"build an empire to stand the test of time"neatly encapsulates its appeal

to the Zuckerbergian brain.)

Mike Schroepfer, CTO: "I have one hand in the day-to-day and one hand in the
future. Its a little bit crazy-making at times, but its important that our core
business continues to do well. Because that is what allows us to aggressively invest
in these longer-term things."

Anyone whos had his or her mind blown by a few minutes of Oculus time in a 3-D,
360-degree world can appreciate why Zuckerberg is grinning. But if Oculus was only
about games, it wouldnt be an obvious fit for his mission-first vision of Facebooks
future. His interest in VR dates back to his experience with, of all things, phones.
When the modern smartphone was being bornApples iPhone debuted in 2007 and
Googles Android in 2008Facebook was a red-hot startup, but there was no way it
could have written its own mobile platform from scratch, let alone persuaded the
rest of the industry to adopt it. By 2013, when it had a bit more clout, Facebook
created Home, which slathered a Facebook-based veneer on top of Android. The
notable flop reinforced the limitations of building on someone elses operating
system. "One of my big regrets," Zuckerberg says wistfully, "is that Facebook hasnt
had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem." (The
company has done okay on smartphones: Multiple studies show that Facebook
captures more of users mobile time than any other service.)

Oculus, then, represents two big bets in one: that VR will be the next major
computing platform, supplanting phones the same way that handheld devices
usurped desktopsand that human nature wont change. "If you look at how people
spend time on all computing platforms, whether its phones or desktops before that,
about 40% is spent on some kind of communications and media," Zuckerberg says.
"Over the long term, when [Oculus] becomes a more mature platform, I would bet
that its going to be that same 40% of the time spent doing social interactions and
things like that. And thats what we know. Thats what we can do." Already, Oculus
helped out with Facebooks new 360-degree video feature that debuted last
September.

Before Zuckerbergs vision can be realized, Oculus needs to start shipping its Rift
headsets. The Facebook acquisition didnt change the companys near-term goal,
which is to offer a version of Rift aimed at hard-core gamers. The closest Iribe has

gotten to disclosing how much the headset will cost is saying that the all-in
investment, including a PC, will be about $1,500. That includes an Xbox One
gamepad, provided through a surprise deal with Microsoft. The Oculus Touch hand
controllers, which are as much of a revelation as the headset and necessary for
tasks such as wielding a Ping-Pong paddle, will cost extra and arrive later.

Oculus might have prospered as an independent company; among other

accomplishments, it had already scored the most spectacular hiring coup
imaginable by signing on legendary game programmer John Carmack (who helped
create the landmark first-person shooter Doom) as its CTO. But like Instagram, it
has benefited from Facebook ownership. "We have supercharged recruiting," says
Iribe when I chat with him moments after the June media event in San Francisco,
where he showed off the Oculus Touch controllers for the first time. "We were 60 or
70 people when we got acquired. And were 360-plus today. Its just incredible how
fast weve been able to grow."

Oculus has also taken full advantage of Zuckerbergs penchant for strategic
acquisitions. "We come to him and say, Hey, theres this brilliant group of
computer-vision scientists, and if they were here and working on this feature, it
might be able to land in the next product or a product in two generations," says
Iribe, who has quietly snapped up five small companies since Oculus officially
became part of Facebook in July 2014. "And hes like, Okay, lets go do this."

As usual with a new venture, Zuckerberg is taking an uncommonly patient approach

to making money from Oculus. "Over the long term, we need to make sure its
sustainable," he says. "But sustainable could mean selling it at break-even and
having a business around software or some other part of the platform, which is
actually something that were much better attuned to."

For Facebook, judging Oculus based on its potential is second nature. "Weve got a
five- to 10-year R&D road map for Oculus thats very clear about what problems we
need to go take down and how were going to do it," Schroepfer tells me. "And so
were just going to build better and better sensors and hardware and software thats
going to allow you to do more and more and thats going to create these amazing
experiences."

Lori Goler VP, People: "People here want their work to matter and their contribution
to matter. And they want to work with an amazing team of people who challenge
them every day. They actually say, I dont ever want to be the smartest person in
the room."

Not everyone is as convinced of Zuckerbergs VR dreams. Wall Street, for one, is

having trouble peering quite so far ahead. "I worry a bit about expectations," says
Colin Sebastian, senior analyst at Robert W. Baird. "Consumers have dreams of
seamlessly entering these interactive environments and interacting with friends.
The tech is early and the virtual environments are very basic." And the competition
is intense. Sony and HTC also have VR headsets coming out next year. Then theres
Google, with its Cardboard viewer that offers VR using just a smartphone and a
paper case for as little as $15. Cardboard is nowhere near as compelling as Oculus,
but its cheap, approachable, and available right now.

Zuckerberg has bigger ideas in mind for what Oculus could become. When he
discusses the company, he consistently refers to "VR and AR," the latter being
augmented reality, the technology that layers virtual objects into the real world.
(Imagine a fictional character appearing in front of you to interact with you in your
home.) AR underpins Microsofts forthcoming HoloLens product as well as the
stealthy, much-buzzed-about Magic Leap. In October, both Zuckerberg and Iribe
confirmed publicly that Oculus is indeed working on augmented reality. If Oculus can
squeeze its technology into something that looks more like a pair of glasses and lets
you see the real world as well as the virtual one, "it could be the last electronics
device that a lot of people need to buy," Zuckerberg muses. And this time around,
Facebook would be the company selling it.

"If youre the average connected Facebook user in the U.S., you spend a dollar a
day implicitly on data," Sandberg explains.

Facebook has succeeded because it has continuously found a way to scaleits

service, its business, and its ambitions. "The Facebook of today is in so many ways
exactly like the Facebook of 2008," says VP of people Lori Goler, who joined the
company that year, when it had a mere 80 million users and less than one-twentieth
its current head count. "The culture is the same. The values are the same. Marks
tremendous vision, intellect, learning mind-setall of that is the same. Whats
changed is we have a lot more resources now in terms of the business growing and
the number of people we have to help us move the world forward."

With the company now reaching almost 1.5 billion people, Zuckerberg can raise that
last partmoving the world forwardto a new level. In August 2014, he appointed
product VP Naomi Gleit, one of the companys longest-serving employees (she
joined in 2005), to manage dozens of staffers dedicated exclusively to implementing
functionality that helps Facebook members do good. A donation tool, launched last
year, allows users to respond to disasters by giving money, a task thatFacebook
being Facebookit sees as an engineering problem that should be attacked through
continuous iteration. "I geek out on this, but with the Ebola campaign we asked
users to select a donation amount," explains Gleit. "We also asked them to pick a
specific charity that they wanted to donate to." This proved confusing to users and
did not produce as much giving as Facebook hoped. "With the Nepal campaign we
reduced it from five steps to two," Gleit says. "We had a preselected donation
amount, and we chose multiple charities and then distributed among them equally."

Tools like this "maybe only can happen on Facebook, or can happen uniquely well on
Facebook," says Zuckerberg (who, along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician,
has given $1.6 billion to various causes). "I think about the organ-donation listing
work that we did. The Safety Check stuff that weve done, where 150 million people
were notified of their friends being safe in the [Nepal] earthquake. You can only do
that if youve mapped out what peoples relationships are, and you have a sense of
where people are in the world, and you have a tool that theyre checking every day."
Hes right: Facebook can indeed do things no other company can.

But it cant do anything for people who remain disconnected from the digital world.
"If we really want to connect everyone in the world and give everyone the ability to
have a voice and share what they want with the people around them, then you cant
just build the biggest Internet service," Zuckerberg says. "You also have to help
grow the Internet." In 2013, Facebook enlisted Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, and
other tech giants to help it found Internet.org, the global-connectivity initiative
dedicated to bringing the Internet to the 60% of people worldwide who arent yet
online.

The effort is a hybrid of short-term altruism and long-term capitalism. "The

fundamental connectivity problem is a financial one," Sandberg explains. "For 90%
of the people, its cost. The World Bank puts absolute poverty at about $1.25 a day.
One in six people live under that. If youre the average connected Facebook user in
the U.S., you spend a dollar a day implicitly on data. So the business models have to
change, and the cost needs to go down. And thats what were trying to do."

"Its not lost on our businesses that as economic standings improve, there will be
opportunities, but thats not the initial goal," adds Matt Grob, CTO of Qualcomm.
"Weve seen throughout the world that when you provide improved connectivity,
people are more able to educate their children and participate in political and
government activities and sell their wares or find jobs."

Internet.orgs first effortan app offering free access to Facebook, news, search, job
listings, and other servicesis live in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines,
South Africa, and 24 other countries. Facebook has deployed it in collaboration with
local wireless carriers, and 15 million people are using it. But the app has received
pushback on multiple grounds, particularly for offering only certain curated services
rather than the full, unbridled Interneta violation, critics say, of net neutrality
principles.

The debate has been particularly heated in India: Investor Mahesh Murthy charged
that giving poor people free access to a sliver of the web amounted to "economic
racism," and several major media companies that had joined the effort pulled out.

Yael Maguire director, Connectivity Lab: "Our focus is technologies that can advance
the state of the art by at least an order of magnitude. We dont want to make
something better by a factor of two or three, because the rest of the industry is
going to do that."Photo: Christophe Wu/Facebook

For Facebook, releasing something, gauging reaction, and then tweaking as

necessary is not only normal but also a badge of honorafter all, one of the
companys guiding principles is "Done is better than perfect." When I ask
Zuckerberg about the controversy, he says, "Internet.org is working. Weve learned
a lot from our efforts already. Weve listened to a lot of feedback from people in the
communities were connecting and have responded by making significant changes
to the program." Among other adjustments, its made the app more secure and
private and now lets any third-party service submit itself for inclusion, subject to
technical restrictions. Given time, the company might get the Internet.org app to a
place thats relatively uncontroversial. Even now, it has its allies. "I firmly believe
that at this point, some Internet is better than no Internet," says Helani Galpaya,
CEO of LIRNEasia, a communications think tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

For the places on earth where theres currently no Internet, Facebook and
Internet.org are tackling that issue too. In terms of land area, explains Yael Maguire,
director of Facebooks Connectivity Lab, "theres only 10% of the world that is not
able to connect if they pulled out a phone. The focus for this lab, going back to the
mission of the company, is to figure out how we can connect the last 10%."

Talking with Maguire, you quickly see why Zuckerberg entrusted him with this
challenge: The way he rattles off stats and facts and calmly deconstructs goals that
sound nearly impossible is reminiscent of his bosss own manner. Facebook opened
the Connectivity Lab in March 2014, and Maguire and his team have concluded that
the answer to their challenge is a dronealthough Maguire prefers the lesspoliticized (though not exactly catchy) term HAPI Link, which is short for highaltitude platform Internet link. By charging an unmanned aerial vehicles battery via
solar power and flying it at 60,000 to 90,000 feet, above weather and conventional
aircraft, the company believes it could efficiently send high-speed Internet access
down to where it is needed via laser.

Facebook began the project with more hardware engineering experience than you
might imagine. It started accumulating this more than a half-decade ago, when
execs decided that the best way to deliver Facebook reliably and efficiently to
hundreds of millions of people was to construct its own data centers and fill them
with its own servers. That path led to the Open Compute Project, Maguires purview
at Facebook prior to the Connectivity Lab, which created power-efficient, easy-torepair servers that the company could install by the thousands in data centers
located everywhere from Prineville, Oregon, to Lule, Sweden. Rather than treat its
designs as proprietary, Facebook shared them with the rest of the industry via a notfor-profit that grew to include support from Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft,
among others.

"When I joined, we didnt have mechanical engineers," says Open Compute Project
Foundation board member Frank Frankovsky, who headed hardware design for
Facebooks servers before leaving in 2014 to cofound a storage startup. "We hired
some of the best in the world. And guess what? Drones need mechanical engineers,
too."

The company acquired instant expertise in unmanned aeronautics in March 2014 by

plunking down $20 million for Ascenta, a U.K.based startup founded by Andrew

Cox, whose previous efforts included a military drone that set a world record by
staying aloft for almost two weeks.

The Aquila drone has a 138-foot wingspan

It's the size of an airliner, but weighs just 880 pounds

The goal: Keep it aloft for three months at a time

Carbon fiber makes it as lightweight as possible

As in the past, hearing Mark Zuckerberg explain his vision proved to be a powerful
recruiting tool. "I personally called up the guy whos leading our lasercommunications effort, who was working at [NASAs] Jet Propulsion Laboratory," he
recalls. "And he said, What? Why are you calling me? And I said, Because were
connecting the world, and I want you to come in and meet the team, and this is
something thats really important to me, and I think we can make a big difference."
Even in the retelling, Zuckerberg makes it sound urgent.

Fourteen months after the Ascenta acquisition, Facebook announced that it had a
full-scale prototype, dubbed Aquila and crafted from ultralightweight carbon fiber.
An empty next-generation Boeing 737-600 airliner weighs upwards of 80,000
pounds and has a 113-foot wingspan; Aquila has a 138-foot wingspan, yet weighs
only 880 pounds. The company plans to begin test flights by the end of 2015. Once
the planes are manufactured, Facebook plans to partner with local telcos to deploy
them.

For all the quick progress the Connectivity Lab has made, much remains to be done.
Its still developing the battery technology necessary to keep the drone in the air for
three months, the companys goal. And though its figured out how to use lasers to
transmit data at blistering speeds in the tens of gigabits per second, thanks to
technology borrowed from Facebooks data centers, it is still ironing out the details
of drone-to-ground communication.

Then there are the FAA regulations, which require that every drone have a
dedicated pilot on the ground controlling it, a restriction that Maguire says would
make Aquila economically unworkable (the same is true of Googles Project Loon
Internet balloons; the two fierce competitors are collaborating to work through some
of the policy implications). The solution? Computer science. "We need good
machine-learning algorithms and control algorithms," Maguire says, "to make it so
that you have 1,000 planes per pilot or . . . I dont know what the number is, but
somewhere between 25 and 1,000."

Zuckerberg on Facebook: "Very few people thought it was going to be a good

business early on, which is why almost no one else tried to do it."

Zuckerberg, who personally researched and wrote a meaty, unsigned Facebook

white paper on the state of connectivity, is, as usual, unfazed. And with 54% of the
voting power of Facebook stock in his control, bouncing ideas off his board of
directors is as close as he ever gets to seeking permission for his plans. "The myth
is that Mark makes decisions and informs the board," says director Andreessen.
"The reality is that we have very detailed discussions."

As Zuckerberg recalls, the board asked him, "Youre going to spend how many
billions of dollars on this? And how is this going to make money? And I said, Well, I
dont have a direct plan now, but I just believe that if we connect these folks it will
be good. And it will help those economies grow. And those people have better lives.
And I think some portion of that will come back to us over some period of time."

Zuckerberg has earned the right to trust his gut. "At the beginning of Facebook, I
didnt have an idea of how this was going to be a good business," he tells me. "I just
thought it was a good thing to do." He pauses. "Very few people thought it was
going to be a good business early on, which is why almost no one else tried to do
it."

Today, everyone understands: Not worrying about whether Facebook was a good
business turned out to be a great way to do business. Zuckerberg has recalibrated
his ambitions accordingly. As Andreessen tells me, "This is a guy whos 31. Hes got
a 40- or 50-year runway. I dont even know if theres a precedent."

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